The sweet spot’s sour underbelly

The claim that Australia has built probably the most prosperous and civil society in the world is indisputable...but very misleading. The message is that we should be mightily proud of ourselves; we are doing well, running a great society and setting a glowing example for all to admire and follow.

Most of those making the claim can be excused because, having the well-trained mind of the conventional economist, they have great difficulty in taking into account anything but dollar costs and benefits. They know that economic growth is good, necessary, and can go on forever. That our high "living standards" are the just rewards for our enterprise and talent, and that the best way to solve any remaining problems is to crank up the economy so we can accumulate more wealth to spend on them.

Well let me mention a few considerations that this self-congratulation somehow overlooks. The first is that our "prosperity" is built on extremely unsustainable practices. There is not the slightest chance that Australia's per capita levels of production, consumption, resource use and ecological impact can be kept up for much longer, let alone be spread to all the world's people.

If all the people in the world today were to rise to the present Australian per capita energy use, world energy production would have to be four times as much as it is, and if we take the probable 2050 population and Australia's energy use growth trend the multiple is around eight.

By the way you might not have heard but we probably went through the peak availability of oil in 2005. How are you going to run the world with less and less of it while demand skyrockets? Don't just assume we will do it on renewable energy; there is a very strong case that that is not remotely possible. And if you think we'll do it with nuclear reactors, do you realise that they only produce electricity? So how are you going to power the other 80 per cent of the economy?

It's the same with just about all the other resources. Minerals, land, forests, fish, water and food are all increasingly scarce and costly. How "prosperous" would Australians be if we had to get by consuming the world per capita average production of copper or tantalum or nickel? Obviously the level of resource consumption enabling our "sweet spot" is far beyond that which all people could share.

And, more worrying, our "prosperity" is built on ecological practices that are unsustainable in the extreme. "Sweet spot" theorists would be well advised to find out about the Footprint concept - they obviously haven't heard of it. The amount of productive land on the planet averages about 1.2 ha per capita, and by 2050 the figure will be about .8 ha (assuming erroneously that we will not lose any more of it).

The Australian Footprint is now about 8 ha. In other words, our sweet lifestyles involve the per capita use of 10 times the amount of productive land that will soon be available to the world's people.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that the world is now consuming ecological resources at a rate that would take 1.5 planets to provide sustainably.  If the expected 10 billion people were to rise to the "living standards" Australians would have by 2050 if we average 3% p.a. economic growth until then, we would need 20 planet earths.

Another minor point they seem to have overlooked is solving the greenhouse problem. In 2007 the IPCC recommended at least a 50% reduction in emissions (and possibly 80%). Because at that time feedback mechanisms could not be taken into account, that target is now widely considered to be far too soft. But if we take it, then a global reduction of 50% would mean that the average per capita emission would have to be about 6% of the present Australian per capita level.

So our sweet spot prosperity is built on the world's biggest per capita contribution to the destruction of the atmosphere. How convenient that the national emission calculation does not include the additional huge volume of emissions caused when the coal we export is burned somewhere else. Drug pushers are condemned; fortunately for us carbon pushers are not.

That's just the tip of the ecological iceberg. How prosperous would we be if we were farming in a sustainable way? We farm in a way that has helped to give Australia just about the world's worst ecological record; the highest species loss, acidified and salinised soils, the Murray-Darling crippled because we refuse to allow it enough water, and the now just-about-inevitable loss of much of the tropical rainforest and probably all of the Great Barrier Reef. How much agricultural and coal export income would be supporting our sweet spot if we were not doing these things?

To summarise, the sweet spot thesis totally fails to take into account the fact that there are savage limits to growth, and we have now gone through them. The planet's ecosystems are being destroyed, and resources are now becoming more scarce and costly. Yet, only one-fifth of the world's people are living like Australians. The rest, ably led by the Chinese and Indians, are fiercely determined to rise to our levels of consumption, because we have taught them that our affluent societies define the goals of "progress" and "development."

This has only been a comment on the sustainability theme, and our "prosperity," comfort and security is built on another enormous fault. The global economy is grotesquely unjust, and we could not have our "prosperity" otherwise.

Who gets the oil? Not the average Bangladeshi, or the other about 4 billion very poor people. A few in rich countries get it because the global economy is a market system and in a scarce market, valuable things go to those who are rich, because they can offer to pay more.

This explains most of the suffering and avoidable death in the world. Why are there a billion chronically hungry people at the same time as 600 million tonnes of grain are fed to animals in rich countries every year? No puzzle; it's more profitable to produce feedlot meat for rich world supermarket shoppers than to feed hungry people, even though you could actually make a (small) profit doing that.

Even more disturbing is the fact that market forces determine that the "development" taking place in the Third World, is predominantly only development of whatever will maximise the global profits of transnational corporations. So Haiti produces baseballs to export, meaning that productive capacity is not put into producing basic necessities for impoverished people.

The rich countries will not tolerate any other option. The IMF and the World Bank force indebted countries to accept their "Structural Adjustment Packages," which arrange bail outs on condition that their economies are further oriented to free market principles – in other words, geared even more to the interests of foreign investors and rich world supermarket shoppers.

How sweet would things be if we Australians had to get by on something like our fair share of the world's scarce resources? How affluent and self-satisfied would we be if resources and products were distributed according to need rather than market forces? Rich world per capita resource consumption is 15 – 20 times that of the poorest 50 per cent of people on the planet.

The sweet spot claim also boasts about our security. How secure from conflict will we be in a world where 10 billion are trying to live like Australians and that is not remotely possible? Our empire is crumbling now. The US is not able to run it in our interests as it once was. It can't win the necessary wars any more.

The Chinese are far more energetic and ruthless at getting hold of the scarce resources and markets, and it's now not much good trying to lecture them about the greenhouse problem, when we created it and they are coming out of hundreds of years of being trashed by Western imperialism. Perhaps it is our turn to cop what they dish out now. My advice is that if you want to remain prosperous from here on, you better remain heavily armed.

So yes things are pretty nice right now, but that's very misleading. The prosperity is largely built on the rapid depletion of the planet's resources and destruction of its ecosystems, and on a global economy which delivers the benefits to a very few rich people. And there is a strong case that the party will end very soon.

In my book, "The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World," I argue that consumer-capitalist society cannot be fixed. The problems are too big and more importantly they are inevitably generated by the fundamental structures, processes and values of this society. They can only be solved by scrapping the growth economy, the determination of society by the market, economic globalisation, and the pursuit of affluence.

Given the era of irremediable scarcity we are entering, a sustainable and just society has to involve mostly small and highly self-sufficient local economies run by local people to meet local needs, in highly participatory ways, and not driven by the quest for profit, growth or affluence.

In my view there is little chance that we will have the wit or the will to accept this. Yet many in the Eco-village and Transition Towns movements are working for a transition to "The Simpler Way."

Trainer, T., (2010a), "Can renewables etc. solve the greenhouse problem? The negative case", Energy Policy, 38, 8, August, 4107 - 4114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2010.03.037

Trainer, T., (2010), Transition: Getting To A Sustainable and Just World. Sydney, Envirobook.